Photo Coverage of Grand Prix Pittsburgh 2000

Player Pictures

Ahh ... Big Deck. Brian David Marshall tries out the joys that are Aaron Forsythes Big Deck Draft Box. Take all your old good rares that you arent using, season to taste with Type 1 power cards, shuffle up, and make booster packs to draft with.

There were two Rd. 9 matches where the winner advanced to the top 4. Here Team Paradox drafts against Antarctica. Antarctica only needed a draw to clinch, but Paradox had really weak tiebreakers and probably needed a win. After dropping one match and on the verge of dropping a second. Paradox finally agreed to a draw, hoping their tiebreakers would randomly improve. They didnt and Paradox finished 5th.

Huey, Ben, and Casey were really happy to advance to the Top 4 at the expense of Tenacious D 3D, especially after Ben Rubin received a game loss for misregistering his deck. Rubin came back to win both game 2 and game 3 against Dan Clegg.

Jon Finkel won a quick 2-0 victory over Rob Dougherty and was then forced to watch his teammates try to finish off an Antarctica win over YMG. Dan O used Rupture to draw his match with Darwin Kastle while Steve O managed to survive extra turns with 1 life point left to draw his own match against Rob Dougherty. Thus Antarctica wins the overall match 1-0-2 and moves into first place with just one round to go.

After the Rd. 8 draft Chris Pikula thought Just For Men was going to get destroyed by Team Diesel. However, here you see him standing on a chair to watch the impossible dream come true. Alex Balandin pulled out his match against Chris Senhouse to give the Men the win and a great shot to qualify for the Pro Tour.

Here Terry Tsang talks about what could have been if only hed drawn land against Matt Vienneau. What could have been is that Team Paradox would only have beaten his Look Out Bello 2-1 instead of 3-0 Its quite interesting to see that teams which had practiced together a significant number of times like Team Paradox are rising in the Swiss while teams that hadnt like Look Out Bello are falling.

Alex Shvartsmans Sufficiently Randomized drew with Tenacious D 3D in round 7 to the surprise of absolutely no one. Mike Bregoli and Dan Clegg are both notoriously slow players and they barely got to game 3 and had little chance of finishing it.

Only one of these two teams could advance to Day 2. Michael Long told me after they built their decks that Suspicion Breeds Confidence was in trouble and he was right. They managed only 1 point they went 0-2-1 with their second set of decks. Huey, Ben, and Casey eliminated them from the event and moved on to Sunday.

The juggernaut that is Your Move Games advanced to Sunday with a perfect 6-0 record. The Alex Shvartsman led Suficiently Randomized also moves onto Sunday in 9th place Alex continues to chase Darwin Kastle in the Player of the Year race.

The Round 2 Feature Match was a beauty: Potato Nation versus 2 Lawyers and a Leiher. Mike Turian took out Jon Becker 2-0 in a green on green match that lasted about 13 seconds. Gary Wise and Pete Leiher both had mana problems in game 3, but Wise hadmore cheap creatures and clinched the overal match early. Scott Johns and John Slaughter took a long time and recruited 387 Rebels a piece into play, but their match only mattered for tiebreakes. Johns had Lin Sivvi and Predator, but Predatotgot Disenchanted and he couldnt deal with Fen Stalker.

When Mike Long gave Brian Schneider a call this week and asked him to come to Pittsburgh, Schneider bought his fiancee -- Kate Stavola -- along with him. She wound up on a pretty impressive team considering her team -- Five Legs -- was formed at midnight last night: both Brian Kowal and Team CMU alum Dan Silberman were hanging out and available.